


We Were Solid

by terrible_titles



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Older Hugh and Ghost!Olivia's romance won't get out of my head, Romance, and this is the result
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 15:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16432049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terrible_titles/pseuds/terrible_titles
Summary: Hugh's not sure who the ghost is in their relationship, but it doesn't seem to matter much anymore.





	We Were Solid

               He seemed to exist, always, in that subliminal space between the worst and best parts of her. She was in the mirror, studying his face carefully, sharply contrasted with the blur of his stubble, the weakness of his chin. She was in his car, furrowed eyebrows in full focus of his own shadowed eyes. She was in his bed, the weight of her arm over him a constant pressure against the faded blue of his night shirt.

               He couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a dream, that chill in the night and the faint whisper of her breath on his cheek. But if it were, it was definitely hers, and he was the mere figment of her imagination. He could guarantee that much, at least.

               Nights like these, where he felt the cold wash over him, he could almost close his eyes and believe that he had never left her there alone in the house, awash in her own un-reality. He could nearly feel his presence next to hers as they stood out and away from their prisons, re-imagining the world around them. He basked in her contentedness, the stillness in her eye, the gentle curve of her lip, and all the powers that were and would ever be couldn’t hold him back from following her into the dark caverns of illusive happiness.

               But that was just a dream, a world of wishes. He knew, because when he’d turn to embrace the wish, she’d be a yawning, horrible face glaring from the empty side of his bed.

               Still, in the dark early morning hours when no one could watch, he’d not flinch away, but rather move closer, nestle her terrible face into his shoulder, stroke the tangled, thinning hair, and wish harder than life that her strange dream was his reality. All the bone-cold limbs and decaying flesh, he’d take all of it.

               Because they were good, when it mattered. _We were solid, babe._

               And those last few days didn’t count, except when they did.

               Forgiveness is like rain, warm tears, except when it wasn’t. Except when it was the stink of rotting clothes in the middle of the night— _come back to bed, my love_.

               He felt the thinning flesh of her lips, icy death upon his own. Her fingers like spider legs tumbling down his chest, a canopy of stringy hair brushing his cheek, the cold air, colder than anything his air conditioner could put out in the Florida heat. And he would close his eyes— _keep your eyes closed, don’t look_ —and be rewarded with that burst of color beneath his eyelids. Reds and blues and purples, so hard and bright he could barely stand it.

               _But anything is better than this emptiness._

               The next day, he’d choke down a pill and bury his face into the pillow to ward off the harsh sunlight slanting through his blinds.

               And yet every night he prayed she’d come back.

               _Do you forgive me, Hugh?_

_Oh, love, how could I not?_

_Go on without me, Hugh._

_Oh, love, how could I ever?_

In the moments of sharpness, when the edge of his chin was in focus in the mirror, he knew suddenly that she had never been there. She was alone in the warped time of a house he’d left behind. And he was here, holding the door—closed, opened, he couldn’t tell anymore—to their past. Or their future. They had no place in time now.

               _There is nothing here for you._

But he would not give in to those daydreams. Time moves through beginnings and endings, over and over again, until every shattered piece of it is nothing more or less than the other. He was in that house with Olivia, in the same way he was outside of the house without her. Both things were true, simultaneously. And therefore it was no more or less true that he was in her life, burdening her every movement and thought, floating around the edges of her peripheral vision, forming strange and beautiful colors behind her closed eyelids. He was the wish in her dreams, specter of her nightmares; she lived through him and he lived through her, each on opposite sides of a door neither opened nor closed.

               He would awake with a gasp, eyes open, the glare of an orange streetlight hovering hesitantly on his bed. She would awake with a start as the dying flicker of yellow light announced the long black day ahead.   

               That was why it was no surprise to wake up next to the red room, a place of frozen time, thinning repetitions of memory, the temptation that was always there in the edge of his vision. A sharp reality against the blurring of his days.

               One night, long ago, he had left her there with the guilt and fear of so many broken lives, a colorless world traded for another. And he would have followed her anywhere; he would never have even hesitated, but for the children, but to guard and bear witness, without judgment, with no pretense at understanding any more of the world than they. He lived as a shadow for years, a line tethered to nothing. He was soft earth begging for the chill of the night air. Alone, yet barely apart.

               There was always the vague stench of helplessness that followed him, the echoing voice in his ear as she attempted to steer his ship, to right his direction, to navigate him through the treacherous storms of their children’s lives.  

               But then one night, he found her among those many threads like snowflakes, and he promised her outside the red room, away from the screams and tears and clawing wretchedness of the world, that they would share the stillness once more. He would be her frozen memory. They could exist outside time, outside of those grasping stupid hands of fate and light and good.

               The sacrifices that one made for their children could be enormous, but sometimes they felt like nothing at all. 


End file.
